


Meta posts on Tommy and Grace's relationship

by deadendtracks (amonitrate)



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Class Issues, F/F, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:22:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 10,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26375668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/deadendtracks
Summary: A compilation of meta posts originally posted to tumblr focusing primarily on the relationship between Tommy Shelby and Grace Burgess.
Relationships: Grace Burgess/Tommy Shelby
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20





	1. You keep us safe/I will make us safe, the vow scene in 3.01

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to tumblr in 2019-2020. Even with tagging it's not the easiest to find your own posts again on tumblr, so I wanted to collect these posts in one place.

[You keep us safe/I will make us safe, the vow scene in 3.01](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/187202155473/deadendtracks-you-keep-us-safe-i-will-make-us)

#you keep us safe / i will make us safe #very different things

oh man i should… say more about this. i’ve definitely gone on to [@veneredirimmel](https://tmblr.co/mIsW_in3ClvI216xFDYoTaw) about it before but there’s a lot going on there.

* * *

Okay, I will try to be… probably not brief. Sorry! It’s complicated!

So what’s going on with that vow scene? So much! 

What I really, really would have loved to have is an entire season that takes place between the end of s2 and the beginning of s3 to show us Tommy and Grace’s relationship, but I do think you can extrapolate a lot from what we have. One of the things I like about the show is that the writing is very concentrated and so you can make educated guesses/interpretations from little pieces.

One of the factors at play in the vow scene is Grace’s characterization. I won’t argue with anyone who thinks she’s written poorly/as OOC in s2/s3, but I don’t necessarily agree with it; or maybe a better way of putting it is I think you can make sense of what we have in canon in a way that reads to me as consistent with s1 even if you think the writing could have done a better job OR you wish she’d been depicted differently, which are both views I totally respect. But I like to attempt to make sense of what we have in canon, because it’s what I enjoy doing, so here’s what I’ve come up with.

Grace was raised in a wealthy family, in a politically violent situation where she was on the side of power/Empire – her family are loyal to the British Crown and her father died while fighting the IRA. I don’t know enough to flesh out those dynamics further, but I think you can see that there’s both political and class issues going on there; the fight for Irish independence is happening and she’s on the side of the Crown. When she comes to Small Heath as Campbell’s spy, she’s motivated by a wish to avenge her father’s death and it biases her opinion at first towards suspecting the IRA, making it obvious to her that of course the IRA must have stolen the guns, it could only be them. She also makes disparaging remarks about how “these people” live, meaning the people of Small Heath, who were not born into a wealthy family like she was. Tommy pegs her as a rich girl right away despite her cover, he just misinterprets what she’s doing there.

Grace kills an IRA man in self defense (though note her following him was driven more by her hatred than any legit suspicion that had to do with her mission to find the guns) and this had a profound effect on her. She’d never killed anyone before. Then during Tommy’s meeting with the IRA instead of just holding a gun on them the way Tommy’d asked, she fires and kills another man, again reacting out of vengeance and the trauma of her father’s death. 

There’s a lot more we could talk about re: Grace and Small Heath and the Shelbys but bottom line: Grace was directly and indirectly responsible for quite a lot of violence in season 1, including killing two men, causing Freddie to be arrested and tortured, and ultimately the showdown between Billy Kimber and the Peaky Blinders, including Danny Whiz Bang’s death and Tommy getting shot. Polly very much read her accurately in their confrontation at the end of the season: Grace saw all of them as low people, as below her, as violent, and she had no understanding at all of why the Peaky Blinders might be in the crime business to begin with, as if it was just a simple choice to be criminals. Which will become important in s3. Her world view is a privileged one.

The thing was, Grace’s primary motivator for being a spy wasn’t really about solving a crime (the stolen guns) at all, it was at heart about revenge and hatred for the IRA, which had killed her father. In the end Grace tells Campbell that now that the mission is finished she’s retiring. Having killed 2 IRA men she has no more taste for vengeance, and with that gone she has no more motivation for her work for the Crown. 

But she did fall in love with Tommy, and she dramatically misread him when she asked him to run away with her at the end of the season, because she did not understand him well enough to know he’d never leave his family.

So season 2: having shot Campbell she flees to America and eventually marries a rich guy. Who is sweet and kind to her; but she’s still in love with Tommy. When they meet at Ada’s house, and Tommy asks if she’s armed, she gets angry. It’s played a bit as a joke by Tommy, but Grace’s reaction – she doesn’t carry a gun anymore – can be read defensively. 

She doesn’t need guns anymore because she’s done with violence and killing, because she’s done with revenge. She’s returned to what she was more familiar and comfortable with, what she knew before her father’s death – wealthy society. And I think this reversion to wealthy womanhood had a lot to do with her reaction to killing – it horrified her. So she retreated to what she knew, where she felt safe, and in a view of herself/a role that she felt safer occupying (rich wife, rather than spy who has killed), and insists she doesn’t need a gun – _she’s not that person anymore_ is the heavy subtext in her tone, I think. She’s chosen to put the fact that she was capable of killing in cold blood – like them, like the IRA who killed her father, like the “low people” she came to Birmingham to investigate – behind her and never look back. She has the *option* to attempt to do so, *because* she was born wealthy. 

There’s a lot going on about classism and how violence is classed I think too, if you want to look further into it, and the show is definitely aware of how violence is classed – especially in s3.

Anyway, so Grace sleeps with Tommy and gets pregnant and finds him at the racetrack to tell him about it and when he reacts… well, frankly, a bit blank/cold from her perspective and tells her to lie to her husband about it, she gets upset. You can understand what she’s thinking there, not knowing anything about what’s going on with Tommy at the time, but the interesting thing is she brings up the flip of the coin, bitterly, indicating she was still a bit angry that he didn’t run off with her at the end of s1. She must have read the coin flip as flippant, rather than as a sign that he was incredibly torn between his feelings of responsibility and loyalty and love towards his family and his feelings towards her, which I think was what he was trying to communicate. 

What she didn’t know was that Tommy was in the middle of an assassination plot that he’d been coerced into under threat by Campbell. And in the end, despite the fact that he succeeds in the assassination and Polly kills Campbell, he ends up surviving a mock execution (a recognized form of torture, a power move to show that Churchill can have him killed whenever he’d like) and then is told Churchill would have more work for him. He hasn’t escaped the trap.

Which brings us to s3 finally! 

What we do know is that apparently Grace’s husband committed suicide, possibly after finding out Grace was pregnant with another man’s child. We don’t ever find out what Grace feels about any of that, but … yeah, that’s a lot. Without blaming her for her husband’s choice, you can recognize that if he was the sweet kind man as she’d said, her actions must have hurt him deeply. Given her reaction the last time bad things had happened it’s not a surprise to me that it looks like her way of coping with this is to throw herself into her new life as Tommy Shelby’s wife. As Tommy Shelby’s rich wife, with the properly channeled charitable interests of an upper class woman. Again it’s what she knows, it’s how she grew up.

Which brings us to that vow!

So here’s a couple of things about it. I haven’t talked much about Tommy given he has more scenes in s2 and he doesn’t dramatically change the way Grace appears to so he’s easier to read. But what is important to know about Tommy is that back in s1 he’s already intending to take his family legitimate. Before Grace even, he’s driven to get enough power to move from illegal bookmaking to legal bookmaking. He comments to John about “honest bloody business” being something that would shock their grandfather. We know from what he told Jessie Eden about money and about having no shoes as a child (and other factors such as how Polly’s children were taken away from her) that the family was very poor growing up. And especially given what I understand of the class dynamics in Britain and the economy of the time (my knowledge is shallow), it’s extremely difficult to move from poverty to even the middle class, let alone wealth, via strictly legitimate means. It’s basically impossible to say, work in a factory and save enough. It may take generations, if it’s possible at all.

Which is one of the strong motivators for illegal business! 

So at the start of s1 the Shelby’s have been moderately successful with the illegal bookmaking and the protection racket, not nearly enough to move, say, out of Small Heath, but they’re doing relatively well. They can afford shoes and they’re not starving and Ada can afford pretty decent clothes and go to the movies, for example. As I said, even before he fell in love with Grace, Tommy’s motivation was to take what he’d learned at war and use it to get his family from doing okay at the illegal business to thriving in a legal business. I don’t think Tommy’s particularly motivated by money itself; but rather sees money as a tool and as a symbol and as a form of protection from things like authorities taking your children away. 

Then he falls in love with Grace, and even before he realizes she’s a spy, he knows she didn’t grow up the way he did and he tells her that he’s going to go legit, in an urgent way that has a lot of subtext about his own class issues and how they might bump up against hers as well as his perception of her expectations for any shared future.

So jumping ahead to s3, he’s pretty wealthy! His plan to be, as he told Michael, 80% legal in 3 years is on track. And it’s heavily implied that a lot of that might have to do with the cash that is coming in due to the plan Churchill has roped him into re: the Russians. More about that in a moment. But overall he can afford his ridiculous house and his lavish wedding, and when I go into the vow and Grace’s expectations, I don’t want to simplify it and make it seem like none of this is what Tommy didn’t already want.

But there’s still the fact that Tommy and Grace grew up in dramatically different worlds. Grace’s family wealth was obviously generational and inherited. Her uncle and the rest of the men in her family appear to all be officers. They make a point of rubbing the class differences in the face of the Shelby family by showing up to the wedding in uniform, knowing that they’d all have outranked the Shelby’s in the war, because rank is also a class issue. In fact it was the officers who were incompetently sending them all to die in horrific trench warfare. Tommy gets epically pissed off about it (not to mention probably a bit triggered at all the uniforms at his wedding) and he and Grace fight; but really it’s just an outlet for his anxiety over the Russian Business. Which he admits to Grace more or less, when he tells her that this is what he’s like when he’s scared, that he’s scared for her and for Charlie. When she asks what he’s afraid of, at first he deflects and distracts her with uh, the marriage bed. 

Later we learn from Grace that he’s told her at least a bit about the Russian plan, though from the way she talks about it to Polly, it doesn’t seem like he told her that he was coerced into it under threat to his entire family, as he reminds Arthur. Though maybe Grace was just posturing to Polly, idk. 

Because, here it comes, the dance.

Polly told Grace that the Russian Business was going down that night, at the wedding, which she hadn’t known, possibly because Tommy hadn’t known either when they’d talked, but it’s ambiguous whether he would have told her if he had. So during their dance, she says: 

_Tommy, please don’t let anything happen tonight. Just get this business done and get away from things like this. I’ll run the foundation, you run the tracks and sell cars. Promise me._  
  
Like I said, there’s A LOT going on here. 

For one, none of this is in Tommy’s control. The Russian just showed up at his wedding, and Tommy’s not in any position to refuse the business, given the threat to the family if he doesn’t cooperate. 

For two, she’s putting him on the spot in front of everyone they know, basically, in a situation where he can’t react without drawing attention. There were other ways she could have dealt with this, less public ways, but she choice to voice it as a _wedding vow_ in the middle of a public and symbolic dance. This sort of implies to me that she doesn’t actually want to know the details, she just wants it to go away.

My guess is the understanding between them was that he’d take the business legit sooner rather than later, and “get away from things like this.” That’s something he wants to do, it’s not just Grace’s expectation of him. But I think the issue is a conflict of their expectations of what that’s going to take, and the timeline. And that was probably before Churchill roped Tommy into international espionage against his will. 

Grace is reacting to what she earlier saw was a situation that scared Tommy deeply by retreating to what she knows and is comfortable with, to her normal: “legitimate” wealth. Which if you’ve read the [script to 3.01](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fdownloads.bbc.co.uk%2Fwritersroom%2Fscripts%2FPeaky-Blinders-S3-Ep1.pdf&t=ZThmZTVmNmFhY2RhZjU2ZTkwY2IyODE5MDQwYzgxODdjYTZhMDcyYixsa0V1RU5MZA%3D%3D&b=t%3A50h35SVaAKemYjDalwGDmw&p=https%3A%2F%2Fdeadendtracks.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F187202155473%2Fdeadendtracks-you-keep-us-safe-i-will-make-us&m=1&ts=1599666284) there’s a cut scene where Tommy makes a pointed speech to her uncle after he comments on his concerns about the “many stories of corruption and violence” around Tommy’s low class family:

_I have very good contacts with the car makers of Birmingham. They tell me officials from the War Office, which you control, regularly accept bribes to commission certain factories to make armoured vehicles for the British army. I have no doubt you are aware of this practise. As an exporter to the Empire I also have contacts at Bombay docks where you were personally responsible for the execution of Congress party organisers who tried to block the unloading of military provisions. Ten men hung from cranes. A month ago. Please do not talk to me about being uneasy._

So yeah, that’s one bit about how violence is classed. I think the speech was deleted for pacing reasons but it shows that Tommy is very aware of the way the upper class uses violence to enrich itself, and doesn’t consider it any better than what he’s doing. As with his speech to May in s4, Tommy’s pretty aware of the hypocrisy of how his “illegitimate” business is viewed as violent and how the “legitimate” business of the upper classes is viewed as free from violence, despite the reality being that they’re violent on a much larger scale, they just keep their own hands clean. 

Back to the vow. Grace’s experience of wealth was generational and inherited, and I think this colored her view of just how quickly Tommy could take the family 100% legit. He might have been able to afford a country manor etc, but he doesn’t have the deep cushion of wealth that is behind the entrenched upper class like Grace came from. Given the fact that Grace has never actually had to earn money, I think she seems to view Tommy’s continued involvement in “things like this” as a choice he’s making, one he can just choose not to make. Churchill’s coercion aside, I don’t think that’s true of Tommy’s financial situation yet. As he told Arthur, with the profits from the Russian Business, they can further their legitimate business; even by s4 he’s not 100% legit yet despite buying up factories and real estate. And as we see from the end of the episode, he’s keeping his assets IN CASH IN A GIANT VAULT IN HIS OLD BETTING SHOP rather than a bank, because a bank comes with a paper trail, and his money isn’t legit yet. Which was why he was buying up property in s2, for example, to launder his money.

So yeah. I don’t mean to make Grace out to be a bad guy here. I think she just doesn’t understand, because she grew up really rich and that formed her expectations. And I think you can possibly read into her character a tendency to… retreat from things she doesn’t want to deal with. After she found out she was capable of violence, of killing, she retreated back to a role she was comfortable with and rejected that side of herself, she slotted herself into the persona of Rich Wife Who Runs Charities. She thinks Tommy should also do this; but the thing is, Grace’s experience of violence was two incidents over the course of like, a few months. Tommy spent five years in war. Tommy did not have a wealthy family to fall back on. This is not to minimize Grace’s trauma but to say that Tommy’s situation was quite different. And Tommy’s means of coping *is* the business.

I’m afraid I’ve probably left a bunch out. But anyway. Grace says she’s known something is up with him for weeks, but she didn’t ask about it until Tommy was obviously agitated and they were fighting. Then Tommy admits he’s scared (I mean have we ever, before or since, seen Tommy admit aloud he’s scared?) which means Tommy’s mortally terrified. 

Grace reminds Polly that “she used to do this for a living” but what’s interesting to me is that when she finds out “this” is going down during their wedding, she doesn’t react by using her skills as a spy, or suggest to Tommy that she should help; she reacts by retreating into her Role and insisting Tommy should join her. And like when she asked him to leave with her in s1, Tommy can’t do that. In this case, his family will hang. There’s obviously been an implied threat to her and Charlie and later there will be a direct one towards Charlie if Tommy doesn’t comply. 

Which brings us to Tommy’s response to her request for a wedding vow: 

_I promise. No guns in the house and Charles will never see one._

He doesn’t make a promise he absolutely knows he can’t keep – he doesn’t promise to get away from “things like this” because he knows he can’t. He’s not being allowed to; and he’s not financially sound enough to fall back only on the legit business of the car parts and legal tracks. So he promises something he thinks he can control: no guns in the house and protecting Charlie from the old business.

Then Grace continues: _I love you, you keep us safe._ She’s already said _Just get this business done, don’t let anything happen tonight._ The ‘you keep us safe’ is an active thing and has a subtext that they’re already in a safe place that just needs to be defended/maintained. 

And Tommy responds: _I love you, and I promise I will make us safe._ Which has a subtext that they are not, in fact, currently safe at all. Which he tried to tell her.

There’s so much I didn’t get to that I think is relevant, including Tommy’s desire in s1 to share “everything” including the business with Grace, to be _helped_ with it, and how her betrayal might have bit that in the bud and still had an impact on his ability to trust her (with the Russian business, for example) even after they got back together. As well as Grace’s end of things, where though she tells Polly espionage is what she used to do, she makes no move to actually do any of it when it crops up and instead just demands a promise from Tommy that he’ll make it all go away. And I think that is, as I said earlier, because she never dealt with the fact that she was capable of killing. Where Tommy never had a choice: he was in the trenches, he couldn’t retreat from killing unless he wanted to die.

Lastly, the issue of safety: Grace went from a life of (relative) safety to temporarily a life of danger, then back to that safety. Tommy’s never been that safe, not even as a child. Even before the war. He was not safe from extreme poverty, or physical abuse (from at least his mother, who beat him with a frying pan) or from his family being broken up by the authorities, as happened to Polly. Then he goes to war. So Grace sees safety as a thing they have that they just have to protect. Tommy sees safety as something his illegitimate business is helping him buy for his entire family _for the first time._

Okay sorry this is so long, I will be really impressed with anyone who reads the entire thing.


	2. More on Grace and Tommy and the vow scene in 3.01

[More on Grace and Tommy and the vow scene in 3.01](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/187203293483/my-lady-knight-thanks-for-your-awesome-tag)

[@my-lady-knight](https://tmblr.co/m4XNXMlrPSQJ0y0pk-0V2dQ)

Thanks for your awesome tag commentary!! and for actually reading that ridiculous post!

#THIS IS THE GOOD STUFF RIGHT HERE#I’m one of the ones who was Not Pleased with Grace’s writing in S2 and S3#because of what I thought was wasted potential for character development#I *wanted* her to be part of the business#but because of what you wrote I have a whole new appreciation for what *is* there#and how those things about her in S2 and S3 tie into the larger story of class and violence#I still miss her because of all her potential#capable of violence and ruthlessness#horrified by it#but ultimately falling in love with a man defined by it#and choosing to marry him#also lost#like the whole thing in S1 and her obsession with getting revenge on the IRA never felt really *there*#but I think she doesn’t really know who she is outside of her upbringing#and working for the Crown against the IRA#that’s what her family does and did#her role and her surroundings might be unfamiliar but the context is the same#and then she left#and she fell in love with Tommy#and then she betrayed Tommy#and…she really *doesn’t* know who she is outside of upper-class wealth despite her experiences in Small Heath#ooooffff the conflict and angst and feelings and inevitability of the entirety of this show#I read this all and I love it all#good meta is good#Grace Burgess#disaster human Tommy Shelby#Peaky Blinders

I totally get the feeling of wasted potential and wanting her to have been characterized differently after s1, and I totally want the AU where all that happens (I’ve read a couple but never seen one that really hit the mark for me personally) and would have loved the show had it gone in that direction.

But as you said, I think the show was trying to do something with the characterization it went with beyond just “oh, Steven Knight doesn’t know what to do with her character so he wrote her as a pod person and then killed her off” though I … also totally respect that take (and yes she was fridged), and I’m not totally sure it’s wrong. I just think he had an intentional story he *was* choosing to tell about class and violence, one he’s been consistently telling in every season. I wish he’d more fully told that story re: Grace tbh, but I also think PB is a 6 episode season show and if this was a 13 or 22 episode season show maybe we would have gotten more in depth into these issues. Instead we sort of get the summary version.

I really like your point that maybe she doesn’t know who she is outside of her upbringing; even her motivation to be a spy was about her father’s death and not necessarily about *her.*

I also think that she severely compartmentalized the impact her betrayal had on Tommy’s ability to trust her; even in s1 she just… expects him to accept it and run away with her?!? which really seems to lend itself to the reading that Grace tends to ignore/retreat/compartmentalize things she’s unable to deal with, even in s1. She doesn’t know Tommy at all, she doesn’t understand his context, but she romantically thinks he’ll drop everything he’s worked for (because, to her, it’s just crime, maybe? or maybe she sees him as playing a role the way she was?) and leave with her because they’re in love. Where Tommy feels he has obligations, and to Tommy, survival is his family because he does not have generational wealth to fall back on. 

And as for why Tommy might not have confided much in her after they get back together: he might love her, but I don’t think he trusts her nearly the same way as before he found out she was a cop. That’s a major betrayal of trust, and her actions harmed people he loved. She might have seen it as doing her job, but you can’t just expect someone to accept that explanation and trust you the same way again. 

So that whole scene in 3.01 was this mutual disaster of factors, on both sides.


	3. More thoughts on Grace

I do wish Grace had lived, but possibly for different reasons than a lot of people have, because I think the marriage would have been extremely rocky due to the fact that frankly, neither of them knew the other at all well. And I think they were in love primarily with the _idea_ of each other, which is not to say they didn’t really love each other. I think they did! But their backgrounds were so drastically different and frankly I don’t think Tommy ever quite regained trust in her despite how much he loved her, and I don’t think Grace had ever dealt with the impact of any of her own actions at all, and both of them were major compartmentalizers. 

I would love to have seen Grace put some of her espionage skills to use but I think the marriage itself would have been rough at best once they got beyond the honeymoon stage. I would have _loved_ more scenes between Grace and Polly, I would have loved to know if Ada ever found out exactly who got Freddie arrested and how that would have played out. 

Like, don’t get me wrong, Grace had her mission; but you can’t just… ignore the impact your actions had on people you now call family! And even at the end of s1 Grace was just sort of expecting Tommy would let the fallout of her actions go and run away with her as if nothing had happened. She has the privilege of being able to compartmentalize that all as just her doing her duty, just a uniform she wore and can discard, a gun she threw in the cut. But this was Tommy’s life, the lives of his family and everyone he cared about! He can’t just… do that as easily as she apparently can.

Anyway I really do love Grace, hope none of this comes across as if I don’t, I just think her character tends to either be seen as some kind of heroic fantasy or else hated, and the truth to me is way more complicated and messy. Grace was as much a disaster human as Tommy is.


	4. On Grace getting Freddie Thorne arrested

[On Grace getting Freddie Thorne arrested](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/189248557333/deadendtracks-the-peaky-blinders-script-twitter)

the peaky blinders script twitter has gotten to the point in s1 where Tommy was blamed for Freddie’s arrest, and later Polly tells Ada to “forgive” him for it because he has a plan to break Freddie out, and the entire time it was Grace. 

Grace was fine with Tommy being blamed – she was right there watching when it happened. Grace absolutely did not have to get Freddie arrested – she knew he had nothing to do with the guns! 

She did it anyway because she was a true believer and therefore Freddie needed to be arrested because he was a Communist and therefore an enemy of the Crown. And she was fine with it happening when he was going to see his newborn son for the first time, knowing he’d be arrested in front of Ada, whom she’d pretended to befriend as part of the investigation. It’s a cold move, it really is. Does it make her a badass? Sure, I guess. But she was from a wealthy Protestant family in Ireland and it’s extremely consistent with her politics, isn’t it. So she’s being a badass for an oppressive power, here, and this is an aspect of her character that is frequently ignored. Everything Polly says about her in their confrontation is exactly right. 

When Campbell says they are of like minds and shared values, yeah he’s being gross and hitting on her, but _he’s absolutely right as well_. Grace believed in everything they were doing, including torturing Arthur for information. The only thing that made her hesitate with Tommy in the end was that she’d developed feelings for him, and even then she gives Campbell the location of the guns knowing this will damn Tommy. I don’t know what she thought was going to happen after that, and she isn’t shown to be a naive person, so.

There are so many things about Grace that get overlooked and this is a huge piece of that.

[#we can love Grace without overlooking who she was](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/we-can-love-Grace-without-overlooking-who-she-was)[#i mean i do love her](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/i-mean-i-do-love-her)[#but she did made a few very terrible choices past the point she’d fallen in love](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/but-she-did-made-a-few-very-terrible-choices-past-the-point-she%27d-fallen-in-love)[#including waiting for the last possible moment to say that a small army](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/including-waiting-for-the-last-possible-moment-to-say-that-a-small-army)[#if Kimber’s men were going to attack Tommy when he was vulnerable](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/if-Kimber%27s-men-were-going-to-attack-Tommy-when-he-was-vulnerable)[#that goes way beyond the scope of her mission](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/that-goes-way-beyond-the-scope-of-her-mission)[#and resulted ultimately in Danny’s death to protect Tommy](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/and-resulted-ultimately-in--Danny%27s-death-to-protect-Tommy)[#a paragon if virtue she was not](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/a-paragon-if-virtue-she-was-not)[#(it’s ok i dont want her to be)](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/%28it%27s-ok-i-dont-want-her-to-be%29)[#but i think all those actions did change how Tommy related to her](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/but-i-think-all-those-actions-did-change-how-Tommy-related-to-her)[#even as he still loved her](https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/even-as-he-still-loved-her) ([@veneredirimmel](https://tmblr.co/mIsW_in3ClvI216xFDYoTaw))

[i see a lot of 'she was just doing her job' around](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/tagged/i-see-a-lot-of-%27she-was-just-doing-her-job%27-around) [and yeah ok](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/tagged/and-yeah-ok) [but her job was the guns](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/tagged/but-her-job-was-the-guns) [not informing on communists](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/tagged/not-informing-on-communists) [that she did just because she believed](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/tagged/that-she-did-just-because-she-believed) [she would have fully supported tommy informing on the communists later](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/tagged/she-would-have-fully-supported-tommy-informing-on-the-communists-later)


	5. Making sense of Grace in season 3

[Making sense of Grace in season 3](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/187215868963/more-unorganized-thoughts-i-want-to-get-down)

more unorganized thoughts i want to get down before i forget them

sticking again with how things went in canon, i wonder how much of Grace’s reaction to what Tommy’s told her can also be traced to her background. She was from a family who was wealthy and loyal to the Crown and apparently her uncle had something to do with the War Office if Tommy’s deleted speech is anything to go by. She’d worked as a spy undercover for Churchill indirectly through Campbell. She’s part of the power apparatus.

Note she apparently had absolutely no problem with anything Campbell did in Belfast to the Catholic Irish (it’s also implied she may have played a role there as well, before coming to Small Heath), nor did she have any problem with anything Campbell did in Small Heath while investigating the missing guns, including beating up/torturing Arthur and terrorizing the neighborhood in general. She identifies with the Crown, totally. The only thing she ends up disliking about Campbell is his hitting on her and making assumptions about her ever being romantically interested in him, which was definitely weird and gross and unprofessional, and she wanted to be treated as a professional. He was a friend of her father’s, someone she’d looked up to, which means, again, she seems to have fully accepted every brutal thing he was doing in Ireland.

So, yeah. She killed a couple of IRA guys herself, she directly got Freddie Thorne (Communist; nothing to do with the guns as far as she knew, but Communists are the enemy of the Crown) arrested, most likely by tipping off Campbell where he’d be, given she was the only one who had that information. And this was after she’d at least casually befriended the very pregnant Ada who while Ada was worried about Tommy and Freddie killing each other. So she knew Ada, and knew what would happen when Freddie was arrested _right after Ada gave birth_. I mean, that’s a cold thing to do, it just is. She’s a true believer. She’s got a tentative sort of relationship going on with Tommy by that point even, and still gets his sister’s husband arrested, knowing he’ll probably hang.

She was also the only one who had the information about Tommy’s plans for Billy Kimber, as far as I can tell – Campbell seems to have been a pretty shit investigator, unlike her, so she must have filled him in on a lot of what was happening for him to have known enough to do what he did at the end of the season. 

She’s in love with Tommy but she gives up the location of the guns to Campbell, and had to know that could get Tommy and half his family hung. So, uh. Yeah. She does it but asks Campbell to leave him a lone, which … i guess you could call naive at best, or deeply in denial, or??? What did she think was going to happen?

Anyway what I’m trying to say is her being in love with Tommy does not appear to have changed her views of the people of Small Heath in any way. Instead she seems to see him as an exception. He’s special, he’s smart, he’s not like them, not a low person. Which probably was why she thought he’d just drop everything and leave with her at the end of the season. She doesn’t see him as one of them, but he is.

Tommy tells her about the Russian Business in s3, and again we don’t really know exactly what he told her or how he told her, it’s possible he deliberately made it just seem like a business proposition and never connected it back up with why he was scared out of his mind or told her of the threat to his family if he didn’t cooperate, or the mock execution that makes it clear the threat has teeth. But I’m not sure it matters to how she reacts, because given her station, how she grew up, her loyalties/affiliations before she married, etc, I wonder how much she really *gets* the threat.

It’s possible she saw it like this: they were wealthy, Tommy was an up and coming businessman, she’s a woman of breeding and experience, she’s _one of them,_ them being the people in power. The forces that Campbell (and herself) unleashed on Belfast and Small Heath are forces that only wreck the lives of “those people” – the underclass. 

Sure she married beneath her, to a man whose reputation is murky at best, but note – her family did not know her first husband killed himself or presumably why, we’re not sure whether or not her family even know that Charlie is Tommy’s kid, and most importantly, they all show up at her wedding despite their distain. Which means she wasn’t disowned by her family and they accept the marriage. She could have been totally cut off, but she wasn’t. They might disapprove, but they gave the marriage their blessing, even if it was really passive aggressive re: the uniforms.

Anyway so I’m wondering if she really thinks Churchill will do anything to them, because they are not the type of people that the Crown crushes.

This doesn’t quite line up with the way she reacts to Tommy clearly having a panic attack in the nursery in the second episode, where she emphasizes that he promised (to keep them safe), which implies that she clearly saw there was some kind of threat? So yeah, I’m still working that out. If Tommy didn’t tell her that he got roped into the Russian Business under threat of hanging, she might think he got into it on his own devices for the money, and therefore see any fear he’s feeling as, well, the result of his own fucked up choices? Like, just get this business over with and stop getting involved in shit that can blow back on us and be a legit businessman? that might make the most sense to me.

It does line up with her throwing herself into charitable work and leaving the business to Tommy and not pressing him for more information. 

I do think that if there was a direct threat while she was present she’d absolutely be willing to use any means necessary to protect herself and Charlie; I’m thinking possibly she just saw everything as “out there” and a bit abstract and the kind of thing that didn’t touch people who live in nice country manors so it wasn’t quite real to her. 

The violence of the state was something that she and her class wield, not something wielded against her.

one of the things to remember is the Grace we saw in s1 was not the real Grace, you know? It was a cover persona. Not that I think she’s dramatically different from the woman we saw in s1, but she had a whole context that we didn’t see _until s2/3,_ where she was a wealthy upper class woman, and that is just as real as the spy. When Tommy accused her of being a rich girl slumming it, he wasn’t… totally wrong, he just wasn’t totally right, either.

long story short I do agree with criticisms about the inconsistencies/jarringness of characterization between s1/s2/s3 and how Grace reacts to a threat to her and Charlie especially, I’m just enjoying trying to make sense of it.


	6. On Grace in season 1

[On Grace in season 1](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/187220076298/idk-the-more-i-think-about-it-the-more-its)

idk, the more i think about it the more it’s actually hard to make sense of Grace’s s1 choices _without_ the idea that she’s deeply, deeply compartmentalizing things and in a lot of denial about what she’s doing. 

She obviously believes in her mission to the extent that she informs Campbell of everything that’s going on even after she’s in love with Tommy, knowing this information can lead to his arrest for basically terrorism charges, right? Then even after she knows he knows she was a spy whose informing did an immense amount of damage to him, and from his perspective betrayed him, she really does think he might leave with her because they’re in love. 

How does she reconcile all of this, even before she leaves at the end? She tells him she’s done something terrible, so she realizes it on some level, but…

Either there were inconsistencies in the writing of her character even in s1, or she’s someone whose beliefs and actions and behaviors conflict a lot and involve a lot of self-deception even from the start.

* * *

I went back to watch a little s1 last night after my brain dump metas, because it had been awhile, and I’d forgotten that Campbell literally told Grace to seduce Tommy and how early that was, so now I think I have to rethink exactly when I was considering Grace to have been in love with Tommy vs just being a really good actress/doing her job? Probably Grace can’t even pinpoint precisely when that was, is my guess, the old cliche of sort of becoming the role and lines blurring and everything. Anyway again, the compartmentalization thing.

Also I think Grace’s s1 persona was probably much more quiet and watchful than her natural personality due to the fact that she *was* playing a role, and hadn’t grown up in that environment and was being extremely careful about how she presented herself to Small Heath. 

From Tommy’s perspective you’ve got someone whose job it was to pretend to be in love with you and they did a really convincing job of it, then tell you they actually are in love with you, and what a mindfuck that would have been. I haven’t written much about Tommy in this but like I said before somewhere, I wouldn’t be surprised if part of him never completely trusted her again, not in the same way, and that’s probably a part of the dynamic in s3. He didn’t tell her about the Russian Business until the wedding and then he most likely didn’t tell her everything, and imo that wasn’t just out of some kind of desire to protect her.

I do wish the show has been more explicit/done a better job with all of this in s3, because I do think the threads are there but they’re not knitted together as tightly as they could be, if that was the intention.

The other thing I didn’t touch on in talking about Grace in s3 is the actress’s performance, because that’s external to the character-as-seen-on-screenness of what I was trying to explore, but I do think you could tell the actress was not happy that her character was being killed off and that was reflected in her performance, which influences how the character comes across.


	7. More on Tommy and Grace

[More on Tommy and Grace](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/187245059293/deadendtracks-i-have-barely-talked-about-tommy)

i have barely talked about Tommy in all of this, but boy howdy he is also a compartmentalizer. how else do you make sense of him reconciling with Grace after what she did? he’s in love, sure, but c’mon. the two of them were quite a pair, and though I completely believe they loved each other, that dynamic was most likely a recipe for long term disaster. 

i think i’ve convinced myself that he probably didn’t tell her everything about the Russian Business, didn’t tell her that he was forced into it under threat, not with the way she talked about it glibly to Polly at the wedding. Which makes her reactions make more sense to me – if she thinks he got into this scheme from his own choice and to make money, her making him promise to take care of it and protect the family from any fallout fits, I think, better than if she’d known Churchill had given him no choice and threatened everyone. Like if she knew his plan was to phase out the “old” illegal business and ramp up the “new” legal business and suddenly he’s telling her, oh yeah btw I’m gonna rob a bunch of tanks for the Russians for a pile of cash, I can see her being pretty exasperated by it? Like jfc tommy, you said you were getting out of the illegal/dangerous stuff and now _this_? I think that fits best given what we saw.

anyway i’m not sure I emphasized this aspect enough, but I do think you can look at Grace’s behavior after s1 as her way of coping with the trauma of killing and the violence she experienced while she was a spy.

* * *

alright one more comment and then i’m moving on to may, maybe.

but i wonder also how much the fact that Grace’s entire family was there for the wedding, and making a lot of snide comments about the dubiousness of the Shelby business, had to do with Grace’s reactions too. 

anyway like i said, i think there’s a lot of layers going on in that dance/vow scene and how you can make sense of Grace’s behavior.

* * *

i thought i was done with Grace, but no!

I’m watching 2.05 for the May scenes but I forgot that Tommy and Grace hook up in this episode, and here’s yet another example of Grace’s massive compartmentalization/self-deluding issues – we’re shown her outright lying to her husband about where she’s going, then after sleeping with Tommy she clearly feels guilty and makes a comment about how it was wrong, then when Tommy makes a remark about how she used to lie for a living, she says she’s never lied to her husband.

i mean, we just saw her. lying to her husband.

anyway. Grace is way more complicated than May tbh, though I love both of them. May is sort of the opposite in many ways, in that she’s not lying to herself about anything and she doesn’t have the need to compartmentalize.


	8. On Tommy and Grace in s5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written as s5 was airing.

**Anonymous** asked:

_Hi :) what did you think of the scene with Grace and tommy ? I would like to have your opinion on it_

my strongest impression was it was super disturbing! I think I posted about this the night it aired, but the way she is holding his head is as if she’s about to snap his neck or strangle him, and I think that’s meant to represent the fact that the trauma of her murder plus his inability to move on from it and from her is part of what is killing him. it’s tricky because his love for her is completely tangled up in that trauma and in guilt, I’m sure, still, so it’s not as easy as “oh just let her go” because trauma doesn’t work that way, PTSD doesn’t work that way, depression doesn’t work that way, etc.

but she’s telling him to listen to voices and do what they’re telling him to do, and it was in the context of an episode where we saw him flash back to nearly killing himself, so it read to me like he’s projecting a lot of his suicidal ideation onto Grace, telling him to kill himself so they can be together, basically.

i loved the scene but nothing about it was positive, in my mind.

there’s also the fact that he can idealize his relationship with grace while talking to his hallucination of her while his real relationship with his actual living wife is much harder for him.

* * *

**Anonymous** asked:

_what did you want to meant when you said "he can idealize his relationship with grace while talking to his hallucination of her while his real relationship with his actual living wife is much harder for him" ?_

Well, Grace is dead, and Lizzie is alive. He can ignore his real-life relationship problems with his living wife while taking comfort from the hallucination of his dead wife, who can’t cause him problems in the same way as Lizzie can. He doesn’t have to work things out with Grace’s “ghost.” He doesn’t have to do the hard work of every day living with her. She can be this loving ideal who isn’t angry at him for his decisions and doesn’t depend on him for anything. He can pretend his marriage to Grace would never have had any problems and hold the memory of it over his fucked up marriage with Lizzie in comparison, and find his real-life current marriage wanting.

* * *

**Anonymous** asked:

_I read one of your meta and i do not agree on the fact that Grace and tommy were in love with the idea of each other. Yes they probably didn’t know each other well due to the different background but they understand each other. like tommy say "we are the same" and I think that's one of the reasons they came together and fell in love. I think it happened in the scene "You’ve seen me"._

Well, _Tommy_ says they’re the same, and that she sees him, in a moment of trauma bonding when they witness each other killing people. And I do think that this is important, because coming back to civilian life after five years of killing most likely made him feel like noncombatants, but especially the women around him in Britain, could never understand what he’d experienced in France, which put distance between he and Ada and he and Polly in ways that weren’t present before, most likely, and maybe made him think he’d never have a relationship with a woman who would be able to actually see him in a situation like the war and still accept him. His killing of the IRA guy was especially brutal and violent, so he’s reacting to her having witnessed that and failing to run screaming into the night away from him. 

And Grace, who was horrified after she killed the first IRA man, was equally looking for acceptance I think, of her own capacity for violence, which I think scared her. As a woman it’s a much thornier issue, killing and violence, especially as an upper class woman.

The thing is, Grace … still can’t understand what he experienced in France, because shooting three guys over the course of a few months is not the same as unending combat for 5 years.

I don’t think that Grace and Tommy didn’t love each other or think they were solely in love with the idea of each other, but meeting under the circumstances of one party lying extensively about their identity to another and informing on him and his family, and bonding with each other in violent situations, is a complicated and messy start to a relationship. And Grace expecting Tommy would drop his entire life and leave with her for another continent after barely knowing even her undercover identity, let alone just finding out she was an operative of the crown the whole time and cultivated a relationship with him in order to do her job – which was to catch him at a crime, which should have lead to his hanging, is… complicated, at best.

And Tommy’s projecting alot of his need for help and need to be accepted as the post-France man he is rather than the pre-France man his family still looks for onto Grace, especially after they sleep together. Once. 

There’s a certain romance in all of that. It’s not necessarily a recipe for a long term healthy relationship, once the adrenaline wears off and you have to deal with each other as real people with extremely different backgrounds. They don’t know anything about each other as people.

* * *

**Anonymous** asked:

_do you like tommy and grace's relationship? i agree on the fact that their relationship is not totally healthy with grace who initially lied about his identity ... but apart from that i find that their relationship is beautiful and complex and that is what makes their relationship interesting._

Yes, I do like it! And I like them together, I like that complexity, and I also find it very interesting. I just think it wasn’t a relationship that was going to be all roses, or even mostly roses, had she lived, for reasons to do with both characters and their dynamic. But I like my characters in complicated relationships, warts and all, as they say. I think Grace is way more interesting as a character who is just as flawed as Tommy than as this idealized lost love, though I also find the fact that Tommy sees her that way right now to be informative to where his character is at mentally/emotionally, and it’s not a good place to be.


	9. On the effects of Grace’s death on Tommy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crossposted from the meta post on Tommy and PTSD, so if you've read that you've already seen this!

[On the effects of Grace’s death on Tommy](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/187371287418/im-rewatching-s3-and-i-noticed-that-the-times)

**Anonymous** asked:

_I’m rewatching s3 and I noticed that the times Tommy showed his sorrow about grace are so little. I was disappointed that they didn’t show how much he was affected by her death. For me he was pretty fucked up this season because of his ptsd._

Oh I have to dramatically disagree with you there. To me Tommy was practically screaming the entire season, and it was about Grace’s murder. I think he continually shows his sorrow about Grace, but the way Tommy is constructed, he’s not going to talk overtly about it, ever. But you can see it in his face. 

He was deeply, deeply affected by her death. And her murder, in front of him, when the assassination was meant for him _is a source of additional trauma_. The PTSD you’re seeing is also about Grace’s death, his existing PTSD is compounded and exacerbated by her death. It’s the closest we’ve seen him come to completely falling apart until this current season. The hallmarks of Tommy Shelby’s character in s1-2 were his complete control over himself. There were a few moments or cracks here and there in that control. IT’s always been a rigid, brittle kind of control, but it was there, to the point where he’s frankly kind of scary.

After she dies, that all falls apart. He starts spending the night outside with his horse, not sleeping, until he comes back in the morning to see his kid. When the family meets with him in 3.02, he’s disheveled, barely able to concentrate on what people are saying, his normally very neat desk is piled with papers that he has to shove around to find anything. He shuts down Polly and Arthur immediately when they try to talk to him about what happened or show him any compassion, because he can’t handle it. He’s _talking to himself._ Tommy Shelby, the world’s most carefully controlled man, loses it and screams at his brothers when challenged at all on anything, about his wife being dead. He orders the civilian wife of his enemy shot because she’s in the way. Tommy’s ruthless but he’s never been interested in hurting civilians. 

He’s clearly not ready to be back at work in any capacity, but I think in the mixture of his need for the work to keep the chasm/void of his trauma from swallowing him whole and his family being unable/unwilling to function independently without him, he’s “back.” So he gives everyone orders and then disappears to Wales with Johnny Dogs and his kid, the same way Arthur says he disappeared on them at Grace’s funeral. He talks about Grace’s favorite horse but he’s really talking about himself. His voice when he talks to Charlie about Grace being gone is so hard to listen to for me, because he’s just shattered and barely able to even speak about it. And he apparently gets drunk and tells Johnny they’re going to Wales for “absolution” because the guilt over Grace’s death is killing him. He hands over the sapphire the Russians paid him with (it’s huge, it’s got to be worth a fortune, and he’s unsure the Russians are going to bother to pay him anything else for his work) to Madame Boswell to get rid of the physical reminder of Grace’s murder and his feeling of responsibility for it. Not that the latter works much, but enough of the guilt lifts that he can at least function.

Then he comes back to Birmingham and fully anticipates torturing Changretta to death, and seems like he was going to enjoy it, in probably the most disturbing scene with Tommy until s5. That was not a fully sane man in that scene, and his brothers knew it, and Arthur put a stop to it, because I think he worried Tommy wouldn’t come back from it if he didn’t. 

After that he can act like everything is fine and he can move on with his work, which helps him survive, but he’s still completely messed up. He’s speaking of Grace in the present tense – he tells Tatiana she’s with him, talking to him, and I’ve always interpreted that as literal rather than figurative, which fits with this current season well. He starts using his body to get information in a way he hadn’t really ever done, by letting Tatiana seduce him, telling Polly and Arthur and John that it’s about “working for the company” which I think it 100% was for him, no matter what they think about it. He hallucinates sleeping with Grace when Tatiana chokes him. 

Anyway I could go on and recreate the entire season but I think you can look at everything that has happened since Grace’s death as Tommy being deeply impacted by it. He’s just not the kind of man who is going to be able to or want to talk about it. He hasn’t really relaxed the slightest bit with anyone since. And right now he wants to kill himself so he can be at rest with Grace’s ghost.


	10. On why Tommy hasn’t been able to move on from Grace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crossposted from the meta post on Tommy and PTSD, so if you've read that you've already seen this!

[On why Tommy hasn’t been able to move on from Grace](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/187417159253/in-your-opinion-why-tommy-still-unable-to-move-on)

**Anonymous** asked:

_In your opinion, why tommy still unable to move on from Grace?_

I think it probably goes in cycles/waves, where he’s able to move on a bit and then backtracks. But right now I think he’s still stuck in a lot of grief and guilt over her death, and stuck [as I said in this post](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/187360928538/what-did-you-want-to-meant-when-you-said-he-can) in idealizing her and their relationship as his life and his ability to cope has gotten more difficult. Marrying someone he was never in love with didn’t help with this, I think, though it was a choice he made deliberately and therefore he is responsible for his end of his relationship with Lizzie, but as I said, it’s easier to fall back on an imaginary version of his tragically killed first wife than it is to forge a constructive relationship with his living current wife.

When someone you love is murdered in front of you and you feel responsible for that death, that’s traumatic. And trauma sort of… freezes things in time in a way that makes it hard to move on from, like a loop. It’s only been three or four years, which is not a long time in mourning the death of a loved one, even a non-traumatic death. I don’t think his not moving on yet is at all unusual given the circumstances; I think it’s everything else in his life, the external and internal stress, that complicates it. He was unable to really mourn her properly because he had to jump right back into being hyperfunctional for the Russian business, then his family was arrested, then John was killed and the vendetta happened. 

And I think his ability to open up to all the feelings around her death and mourn her in a constructive way, which might allow him to move on, is hampered by the fact that it _was_ traumatic, and doing so might lead to him opening up to all the feelings and issues around the trauma of the war, and consciously or unconsciously I don’t think he thinks he can handle that. 

And I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong that he can’t.

Here’s the thing: people talk about this stuff like “if he’d only just deal with his feelings/his trauma, face it and get it over with and accept it and move on, he’d be better” but it doesn’t work like that with PTSD. He might have coping mechanisms that look dysfunctional but they have _worked_. He’s alive and has been (extremely) functional for 10 years since the war. People self medicate because it works (for awhile, for a given definition of works) and often they have no other good options. Tommy has self medicated with alcohol and opium and single minded work because it’s _genuinely helped_. It isn’t a long term solution but it is something that has worked. That part is important.

Tommy’s _absolutely right_ that opening up to all of the emotions and trauma around Grace’s death (and Johns, and the war) could make things worse for him. It can! It absolutely can if you’re not in a place where you’ll be safe when the symptoms possibly get worse. Keeping all of those feelings etc away feels like a matter of survival to him because it is, not because he only perceives it that way. Because he doesn’t have competent help with managing it in a way that would allow him not to completely disintegrate psychologically, because in 1929 these issues were barely starting to be understood let alone effectively treated. Like I said before, 100 years later and we’re still in a place where people both have a hard time finding competent help and even when they do, it can be very difficult to treat.

Which isn’t to say any of that is ideal, because it’s not, and clearly we’re seeing that the solution, though effective, was temporary. I suspect he was able to maintain things relatively well until the pressures of politics and the parliament were added on top of everything else, and because the morphine is exacerbating things and giving him hallucinations, and we don’t know what’s behind his taking morphine so whatever caused that is also a stressor. 

And the thing is, opening up to all of that would most likely not allow him to work at the intensity he had been, if at all, at least for a while. And there’s a lot of pressure on him, both internal and external, to keep delivering at the level he has been.

Helping people find and stick to healthier coping mechanisms is also something that sounds simple (oh just stop drinking and subsuming everything in work and take up exercise and meditation!!!) but it’s really, really not. Especially with someone who is most likely severely physically and psychologically addicted to alcohol and possibly morphine at this point. Going cold turkey from alcohol at his level of addiction can actually be fatal.

Anyway that answer probably didn’t go where you might have been anticipating? But I do think his inability to move on to Grace is tied up in his inability to mourn her, and his inability to mourn her is directly tied to the fact that her death was traumatic and because of that, gets connected up with all of his other trauma in a way that probably feels like an unravelling sweater that plunges him into the abyss if it unravels too far.


	11. On Grace ‘helping’ Tommy’s PTSD

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crossposted from the meta post on Tommy and PTSD, so if you've read that you've already seen this!

[On Grace ‘helping’ Tommy’s PTSD](https://deadendtracks.tumblr.com/post/187385282238/to-answer-the-question-of-the-anon-i-would-like-to)

**Anonymous** asked:

_To answer the question of the anon i would like to add that Grace was seemingly the only person he found peace with. She was his rock, she helped tommy to get better. we saw it in s1 when he say "I don't hear the shovels". So in my opinion her death definitely exacerbate his symptoms._

I don’t necessarily agree that she helped Tommy get better in the way I think people might intend when they talk about it this way, I think that’s something fandom tends to read into it because Tommy sees it that way the night they sleep together the first time in s1. And because it sounds romantic.

His not hearing the shovels and actually sleeping one night without opium was a huge deal to him at that point, yeah, and that makes sense for him, but it’s not a cure for PTSD, and a person cannot do that for another person in the way he suggests, and leaning on another person to be your PTSD cure is deeply unhealthy for both of you. 

He found some peace with her, yeah, relaxed a bit more than he was previously capable, yeah, opened up more than he had since the war, yeah. 

I do think that he felt he’d found someone who might accept the part of him that experienced war and that definitely potentially helped him, but I see alot of people suggesting that Grace basically cured him of his nightmares and flashbacks based on that one statement. It’s just not how any of this works. 

But yes I agree her death exacerbated his symptoms for a number of reasons. I just highly doubt he was symptom free during their marriage.


End file.
